Richard K. Lodge: Mother's Day for peace

Sunday is Mother's Day and the pressure is on. Have you sent Mom a card? Did you buy her a gift? Have you made a restaurant reservation to take Mom to brunch on Sunday? Mother's Day is reported to be the busiest day of the year for restaurants, so you'd better make the call today.

By Richard K. Lodge

The Enterprise, Brockton, MA

By Richard K. Lodge

Posted May. 8, 2008 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 8, 2008 at 8:21 AM

By Richard K. Lodge

Posted May. 8, 2008 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 8, 2008 at 8:21 AM

» Social News

Sunday is Mother's Day and the pressure is on.

Have you sent Mom a card? Did you buy her a gift? Have you made a restaurant reservation to take Mom to brunch on Sunday? Mother's Day is reported to be the busiest day of the year for restaurants, so you'd better make the call today.

And, speaking of Mother's Day traditions, just how aggravating are the constant interruptions on public radio urging you to shell out $100 or more to have roses delivered to your mother, mother-in-law or some other woman in your life?

When it was established, Mother's Day wasn't supposed to be like this, a day to enrich Hallmark, the floral industry or WBUR. It was established to protest the carnage of the Civil War by mothers who had lost sons on either side of that terrible conflict.

Julia Ward Howe, a poet, abolitionist and activist in the mid- to- late 1800s, formalized Mother's Day in the 1870s as an anti-war protest.

The Civil War brought death in battle and from disease on a scale beyond what this country had ever seen. An estimated 620,000 soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies died during the war. Even before Howe, who wrote the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," took up the anti-war cause, an activist named Anna Reeves Jarvis was carrying the banner for causes to improve the lives of women. For Jarvis, in the late 1850s, that goal was improvement of sanitation in Appalachian communities.

According to research by Ruth Rosen, professor emerita in history at the University of California-Davis, and a former newspaper columnist, "during the Civil War, Jarvis pried women from their families to care for the wounded on both sides. Afterward, she convened meetings to persuade men to lay aside their hostilities."

Julia Ward Howe unveiled her "Mother's Day Proclamation" in 1870 in Boston to shine a light on the horrible impact of the war.

In it she wrote, "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

And, further down, she wrote, "As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel."

In 1872, Howe proposed an annual Mother's Day for Peace. That day was commemorated on June 2 until 1913, when Congress declared the second Sunday in May to be the day.

It was then that the shift began.

Ruth Rosen wrote, "By then, the growing consumer culture had successfully redefined women as consumers for their families. Politicians and businessmen eagerly embraced the idea of celebrating the private sacrifices made by individual mothers," rather than supporting the call to social activism and the coming-together that Howe had intended for Mother's Day for Peace.

Page 2 of 2 - Again, citing an essay by Rosen: "As the Florists' Review, the industry's trade journal, bluntly put it, 'This was a holiday that could be exploited.'

"The new advertising industry quickly taught Americans how to honor their mothers - by buying flowers," Rosen wrote.

And so, the meaning shifted away from women as peace advocates and witnesses for social justice, to women as good ol' Mom, who deserved flowers and a card one day a year, a day when she could be "liberated" from the hot stove in her kitchen.

At this point, more than 120 years after Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, this country is knee-deep in an intractable war in Iraq. With more than 4,000 American war dead in battles far from the fields of Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor or Gettysburg, the toll continues to mount, far off the radar of most Americans, unless they have a family member or friends in uniform.

Sunday is Mother's Day. In 2008, sending a card or flowers or giving Mom a call are good and honorable traditions worth doing. But with America at war in Iraq and no plan in place to bring the troops home, this is the year to re-read and revisit the words and intentions of Julia Ward Howe.

It sounds idealistic and stilted in the language of the nineteenth century, but Howe's words were from the heart: "In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed ... to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace."

Happy Mother's Day for Peace.

Richard Lodge is editor of the Daily News and writes a column published Fridays. His e-mail is rlodge@cnc.com.